For the past six years, homeowners near Preston Center have been battling to keep our dreadful transportation situation — traffic gridlock, zero pedestrian amenities, a shortage of parking — from getting even worse.

We may soon lose the war.

Our two biggest zoning cases ever heat up in January: St. Michael and All Angels Church on Douglas Avenue, south of Northwest Highway, is proposing a 225,000-square-foot office tower and a similarly sized rental apartment high-rise where their playground sits now.

On the other side of Preston Center, council member Jennifer Gates and Plan Commissioner Margot Murphy have been pushing for 18 months to up-zone the 12 acres in and around the Athena and Preston Tower so developers can demolish four low-rise condo complexes and replace them with rental-apartment towers as high as 25 stories. Hal Anderson, who designed and developed the iconic Pink Wall community 60 years ago — one of the last fully owner-occupied, tree-lined, condo communities in Dallas — would be heartbroken.

A look at the brick structure known as the Pink Wall, which used to be the sign of status in Preston Hollow as homeowners near Preston Center, near the intersection of Preston Road and Northwest Highway in Dallas, battle high-rise expansion efforts that will affect parking, transportation and quality of life in the area. Photographed Dec. 5, 2018.

(Louis DeLuca/Staff Photographer)

Never mind that 78 percent of those Pink Wall condo owners staunchly oppose what City Hall is doing to their zoning against their will, and 57 of the 71 city of Dallas homeowners closest to St. Michael's signed paper petitions against that development 18 months ago. Gates and Murphy remain unmoved. (But so do homeowners. An online petition started last month at change.org has 450 signatures and climbing, plus a place to order a yard sign: NO MORE TOWERS IN PRESTON CENTER; FIX OUR TRAFFIC FIRST.)

I take issue with a Dallas Morning News editorial about Preston Center: "A master plan for the area completed two years ago with the input of a committee of residents reads more like a recipe for continued paralysis than a genuine vision for moving forward. It concludes that traffic must be addressed before redevelopment can commence. That's the wrong way to approach this area."

It's actually the only way to approach it, without completely ruining not only Preston Center and the Pink Wall, but all of our adjacent, single-family neighborhoods. (How can two-lane, residential Douglas Avenue absorb thousands of new cars a day? The church and the developer conducted a traffic study, but in a meeting I attended last month, they said they have no solution nor have they reached out to transportation agencies.)

This master plan, the Northwest Highway and Preston Road Area Plan, cost $350,000, with $100,000 of it private money from area stakeholders and $250,000 from the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Its 13-member task force, appointed by Gates, was actually half commercial property owners and developers and half homeowners. (I represented Zone 7, comprised of 250 homes northwest of the Tollway.) After two years of public hearings, development workshops, zone meetings and constant calls for input from every property owner within a mile radius of Preston Center, we made unanimous recommendations about how the area should be developed in the future. And yes, we concluded — developer and homeowner in lockstep — that traffic, parking and pedestrian problems should be addressed before any new development.

A look at an abandoned parking structure with the Preston Center high-rise in the background, as homeowners near Preston Center, near the intersection of Preston Road and Northwest Highway in Dallas, battle high-rise expansion efforts that will affect parking, transportation and quality-of-life aspects in the area. Photographed on Dec. 5, 2018.

(Louis DeLuca/Staff Photographer)

We included 13 pages of detailed recommendations for fixing the problems. Our top priority was an underground parking garage in the heart of Preston Center with a public park on top; No. 2 was an underground commuter tunnel on Northwest Highway from Central Expressway to the Tollway (or further west). We also recommended an elongated, northbound exit ramp off the Tollway at Northwest Highway (to better access the existing high-rise canyon); one or more pedestrian bridges over Northwest Highway connecting homes to retail; storm sewer upgrades (Preston Tower floods in heavy rains); alley, sidewalk and lighting improvements. The lowest-hanging fruit was the deactivation (save for emergencies) of the traffic light in front of the city firehouse on Northwest Highway between existing traffic lights at Douglas and the Tollway.

And, yes, we unanimously recommended adding new Tollway off-ramps at Walnut Hill Lane and Lovers Lane, in order to rebalance the traffic in our neighborhoods. Why do we need rebalancing? At the time of the study, 115,100 cars a day traveled the Tollway under Northwest Highway, and 57,800 cars on Northwest Highway crossed over the Tollway (half of which were not from the area).

None of our traffic recommendations, which NCTCOG's Transportation Director Michael Morris had proposed to our delight, has been pursued by City Hall. To facilitate the new parking garage, the task force had secured a $10 million pledge from local resident Darwin Deason to build the park, along with contingent financial commitments from Morris if the city of Dallas put $20 million in the 2017 city bond program for the garage. But council member Gates only included $10 million (in street improvements) so our No. 1 recommendation died practically overnight. Not even the firehouse light was deactivated.

Just a few months after beseeching her Council colleagues to adopt all the recommendations in our plan, which they did unanimously in January 2017, a three-story condominium, Preston Place, burned down and Gates decreed that the plan was not workable for developers and should be scrapped altogether. To her dismay, homeowners throughout the study area are pushing for her to honor the plan at nearly every community zoning meeting (especially behind the Pink Wall, where our study recommended, in five separate places, that future development not exceed four stories in height).

We all want Preston Center to be redeveloped. Compared to the east side of Preston Road, where University Park has long had its act together, our side is an embarrassment, especially the parking garage. The garage should be the catalyst for our own version of the (original) West Village, which was our task force's vision. But for master plans to work, you need the elected officials who championed them to stay the course. In the meantime, District 13 will continue to show City Hall that there's no shame in fighting to protect your neighborhood.

Laura Miller is the former mayor of Dallas and a resident of District 13. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.